Everyone has done a good deed that went unappreciated, but Rick Maverick can tell you it’s not only people who sometimes resent someone’s efforts to make things better. Animals don’t always appreciate the good things people do for them either.
Maverick is a hunter who enjoys enhancing habitat for deer, turkeys and all wildlife on his 100-plus acres in western Pennsylvania. Besides food plots for hunting, he plants fields of corn, soybeans, winter wheat and clover.
In mid-August, while mowing grass between a farmhouse and a cornfield, Maverick was blindsided. He never saw the assault coming because his hat covers his neck and the sides of his face to protect him against recurring skin cancers. That hat went flying as he was hit from the right and almost knocked off his heavy duty commercial Grasshopper mower.
“What hit me?” Maverick wondered. Was it a Mack truck? Did he hit an obstacle he failed to see, maybe a fallen tree or a rock he forgot was there? Could someone have attacked him on his own property? Could local Bigfoot rumors be true? It felt like a Steelers linebacker came running out of the corn to level a quarterback.
It was none of that, but he hadn’t been hit that hard since he broke two neck vertebrae playing college football. He nearly fell off the mower but recovered in time to see the prime suspect in this cornfield crime on the other end of the farmhouse lawn just before it dropped down an embankment to another cultivated field. It was a nice 6-point buck.
The impact damaged the steering arms on his mower. The right one was now bent far enough to almost touch the left one. But that wasn’t the worst of it.
Stunned, Maverick asked himself, “Am I OK?” His neck and shoulder were sore. His left thigh was bleeding. As the buck springboarded to propel himself away from the mower, his rear hoof cut a deep gash that demanded a trip to the local hospital.
“I’ve seen deer on their hind legs battling other deer, and although they don’t have claws and teeth I don’t want to be a part of that. Hooves can slice people to ribbons. Now, every Christmas when I hear the song ‘Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer,’ I’ll think, it’s not always Grandma. This time it was Grandpa!”
The gash was above Maverick’s artificial knee. Last January he had the knee replaced, and the surgeon said going forward infection would be his worst enemy.
The people in the emergency room thought they had heard and seen it all until Maverick showed up. As a doctor cleaned the debris from the wound he asked, “How did this happen?” That question isn’t just small talk. It’s a common question in hospital emergency rooms. One reason is that today’s insurance companies hope to avoid paying a claim if someone else with deep pockets can be held financially responsible.
Good luck getting that buck to pay. He has a nice rack, but no pockets at all.
— Steve Sorensen (aka “The Everyday Hunter®”) is an avid deer hunter from Pennsylvania and is a frequent sportsman’s dinner speaker.
